Maybe He's Born With It, Maybe It's Moynihan

As we've been reminded throughout the 2016 primaries, voters look for ‘authenticity’ in their political leaders. Insurgent candidates like Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders are lauded for displaying it, while more establishment figures, like Hillary Clinton, are said to be struggling to overcome an ‘authenticity gap.’[1] An ‘authentic’ politician is unspun, unscripted, unusual and engaging, a walking rebuke to the tyranny of pollsters and PR consultants. While complaints that politicians are packaged and over-cautious are certainly not without merit, the concept of ‘authenticity’ in politics is, as Seth Masket has written, 'frustrating' because it is ‘essentially meaningless.’ All public figures are, in some sense, playing a role (which is not the same as dissembling or lying).[2] It nonetheless remains a stubbornly durable cliché, probably because it speaks to a deeper yearning among voters for something perceived to be missing in the political class.  

Pat Moynihan was ‘authentic.’ Journalists were irresistibly drawn by his eccentricities and no newspaper profile could pass without some florid effort by the author to capture them. In one of the first profiles published about the then-freshman senator in 1977, Edward Burks noted the attention the flamboyant Moynihan attracted when he rose to speak in the Senate: ‘Like John Wayne walking into a Wild West saloon … a verbal brawler … his florid delivery, flailing arms, and droll turn of phrase frequently bring on smiles and laughter from his colleagues.’[3] David Remnick wrote in a 1986 profile of ‘the theater’ Moynihan had become: ‘the herky-jerky Anglo-speech, the bow tie slightly askew, the tweedy caps and professorial rambles.’[4] In 1990 James Traub wrote of ‘Moynihan’s oratorical style, a peculiar sequence of plosives and mumbles and distended polysyllables sometimes mistakenly considered British.’[5]

 Pinstripes, bow-tie, and smoulder: Moynihan at a Chamber of Commerce-sponsored two-way television conference between business leaders and representatives of the Nixon administration, c.1970. 

Tall and rangy (6’4” or thereabouts), a frequent wearer of bow-ties and tweed bucket hats, and with a halting, staccato speech pattern, Moynihan cut a strange and enthralling figure in the often staid corridors of the Senate. A former ensign in the U.S. Navy, he responded to Senate roll call with the sailor’s cry, ‘Yo!’ (‘“Here” seems a little too much like fifth grade, and could give the Minority Leader ideas,’ he explained in a letter to William Safire); he began his constituent newsletters ‘Dear Yorker,’ an archaic form of address that Moynihan wanted to revive, though he eventually switched to ‘Dear New Yorker’ after his staff voiced concerns that it made him appear addled; his annual report on New York State’s fiscal imbalance relative to the federal government was called the ‘Fisc.’ after the feudal lands upon which the Merovingian and Carolingian royal households levied taxes.[6]

Such idiosyncrasies made him distinctive, even made it seem as though he rightly belonged to another age, as Remnick suggested, ‘an American Edmund Burke taking dominion on the Hill.’ Peter Steinfels has argued that Moynihan created ‘a new public type … the professor in politics. He does not suppress the professorial, he flaunts it. He has made it his style, just as Sam Ervin was a “country lawyer” and various wealthy western politicians project themselves as cowpunchers.’[7] Moynihan's professorial demeanour was as much of a construct as that of Ervin or those well-heeled Western cowpunchers (we're looking at you, George W. Bush), one that evolved and was cultivated over the course of his life.

But to view Moynihan as a absent-minded college professor who had wandered genially into the halls of power is to miss part of the story. Moynihan’s identity, political and personal, was more of a curious amalgam of ivory-tower academic and working-class tough. Most newspaper profiles made at least passing reference to an impoverished childhood spent shining shoes in Hell’s Kitchen, and an early career as a bartender and a stevedore, before an education at City College New York (at that time free to city residents), a stint as a Fulbright fellow at the London School of Economics, and a spot on the staff of New York governor Averell Harriman, set Moynihan on the path to Harvard, the Senate, and the confidence of presidents. The man (and it usually is a man) who rises from humble origins to great things by dint of grit and hard work is one of the oldest, and most potent, American myths. As Bob Strauss, former chair of the Democratic National Committee, reportedly used to joke, 'every politician wants every voter to believe he was born in a log cabin that he built himself.' Moynihan was certainly not averse to using that myth to his political advantage. 

The truth was, of course, far more complicated than that. As his biographer, Godfrey Hodgson has written, Moynihan’s life story was not exactly one of the ‘the rags-to-riches tales of Horatio Alger.’ Moynihan was born in Tulsa, Oklahoma and did not actually live in Hell’s Kitchen until he was college-age. Though he was initially raised in middle-class comfort in suburban Long Island, after Moynihan’s father walked out, in 1937, the family were plunged into chronic financial insecurity. ‘Marriage broke up and down we went,’ he reflected later.[9] In these years, young Pat and his brother Mike did work as shoeshine boys in Times Square. As a senator, Moynihan enjoyed pointing out his old corner to journalists while campaigning.[10] The war saved the Moynihan family from a life of financial instability: Moynihan’s mother, Margaret, got a job as a chief nurse in a war production factory, while he sold newspapers, worked as a stock boy, and then a longshoreman, and ultimately enrolled in the U.S. Navy.

Despite his later affectations, he remained fiercely defensive of his working class roots. They marked him out, he understood, from many of his contemporaries, in ways that he both embraced and resented. He arrived to take the CCNY entrance test with his longshoreman’s loading hook in his back pocket. ‘I wasn’t going to be mistaken for any sissy college kid,’ he said.[11] Of his classmates at Tufts University, he recalled that most ‘needed a good swift kick in their blue-blood asses.’[12] He carried this attitude into his Senate career. In 1990, one of his aides observed, ‘There’s a certain touch of class warfare about Pat Moynihan.’ This aide cited one instance when Moynihan received a $1,000 contribution from a well-moneyed supporter with a suggestion that he might want to moderate his staunchly pro-Israel stance. ‘No socialite is going to tell me how to do my job,’ was his angry remark when he instructed his staff to return the cheque.[13]

Moynihan’s time in London – where he spent a year in 1950-51 as a Fulbright scholar at the L.S.E. – was transformational. The G.I. Bill and his scholarship guaranteed him a healthy income and Moynihan thrived. He had a lifelong love of good clothes – he was reportedly the only boy to show up to his junior prom in a tuxedo – which he indulged in the tailor shops of London. An ungenerous New York Times retrospective published a few months before Moynihan’s retirement from the Senate wrote of his metamorphosis while in London from ‘self-consciously working-class Irish roustabout’ into ‘an English dandy, replete with bowler hat, monocle and umbrella.’[14] In his enthusiasm to paint an unflattering portrait, the author fluffed some of the details, as an upset Moynihan was quick to point out. ‘A monocle? Any fact checker could have called me,’ he wrote in a letter to NYT publisher Arthur Sulzberger. ‘Do you really suppose a student at L.S.E. in 1950 went about in a bowler hat carrying an umbrella?’ he continued in another letter around a fortnight later.[15]

The monocle was fictional, but Moynihan certainly took to wearing a brown derby hat. As late as 1967, according to one journalist, he was carrying his handkerchief up his sleeve, ‘in the English manner.’[16] He became a regular theatre-goer and attended numerous debates at the House of Commons, absorbing from the MPs ‘some of the lingering mannerisms of Edwardian England’ which he imported across the Atlantic.[17] He kept a journal, to which he gave the modest title, “An Intellectual History of Our Times: Being a Descriptive Journal of adventures & meditations having occurred to the author during a Grand Tour of Great Britain, Ireland & the Continent of Europe.” At the same time, he involved himself in Labour Party activism and insisted that he was known as ‘a New York Democrat who had some friends who worked on the docks and drank beer after work.’[18]

A dandy and a dockworker, then, a New York Irish boy who gleefully launched himself into the English establishment. Those contradictory elements of Moynihan’s identity sat in uneasy tension throughout his career. The Moynihan identity was an oxymoron in the original sense of the word: something that is simultaneously paradoxical and true. It fuelled his dislike of upper-middle-class liberals who he blamed for trashing the traditions of the Democratic Party.[19] Though he took pride in his erudition and his education, and though he seemed set on proving the viability of a politics-as-seminar approach, to the end Moynihan was determined not to be mistaken for a ‘sissy college kid.’

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[1] S. A. Miller, “Authenticity Gap Emerges as Major Challenge for Hillary Clinton in New Hampshire,” The Washington Times, August 8, 2015,  <http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2015/aug/18/hillary-clinton-authenticity-gap-emerges-as-major-/?page=all>.

[2] Seth Masket, “The Bankruptcy of Authenticity,” Pacific Standard, June 30, 2014, <http://www.psmag.com/politics-and-law/presidential-candidates-politics-bankruptcy-authenticity-84641>; See also, Richard Skinner, “Against Authenticity,” Mischiefs of Faction, June 27, 2014, <http://www.mischiefsoffaction.com/2014/06/against-authenticity-by-richard-skinner.html>

[3] Edward C. Burks, “Moynihan’s Flamboyance and Quick Wit Draw Attention to Washington Freshman,” New York Times, November 7, 1977.

[4] David Remnick, “The Family Crusader, Belying Labels, Drawing Crowds & Loving It All,” Washington Post, July 16, 1986.

[5] James Traub, “Daniel Patrick Moynihan: Liberal? Conservative? Or Just Pat?” NYT, September 16, 1990.

[6] Letter, DPM to William Safire, June 23, 1984, Papers of Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Manuscript Reading Room, Library of Congress, Part II, Box 9; Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Steven R. Weisman (ed.), Daniel Patrick Moynihan: A Portrait in Letters of an American Visionary (New York, 2010), 387.

[7] Peter Steinfels, The Neoconservatives: The Origins of a Movement (Rev. ed., New York, 2013), 114.

[8] NCC Staff, “The Annotated Bill Clinton Convention Speech,” Constitution Daily, September 6, 2012, <http://blog.constitutioncenter.org/2012/09/the-annotated-bill-clinton-convention-speech/>

[9] Godfrey Hodgson, The Gentleman From New York: Daniel Patrick Moynihan, A Biography (New York, 2000), 24. 28-29.

[10] Moynihan’s corner was opposite Toffenetti’s restaurant, on the corner of Broadway and 43^rd Street, an establishment famous for its ham and sweets. Garry Wills, Lead Time, 135; Thomas Meehan, “Moynihan of the Moynihan Report,” NYT, July 31, 1966.

[11] Thomas Meehan, “Moynihan of the Moynihan Report,” NYT, July 31, 1966.

[12] Gil Troy, Moynihan’s Moment, 44.

[13] James Traub, “Daniel Patrick Moynihan: Liberal? Conservative? Or Just Pat?” NYT, September 16, 1990.

[14] Jacob Weisberg, “For the Sake of Argument,” NYT, November 5, 2000.

[15] Moynihan, Weisman (ed.), Moynihan: A Portrait in Letters, 645-6.

[16] Timothy Crouse, “Daniel Patrick Moynihan: Ruling Class Hero,” Rolling Stone, August 12, 1976

[17] Hodgson, Moynihan, 48.

[18] Troy, Moynihan’s Moment, 44.

[19] In a 1972 letter to Alan Pfifer, president of the Carnegie Corporation, Moynihan tore into ‘liberal elitists who live cosy upper-middle-class lives, secure in their salaries and their sense of superiority to all but the very lowest classes.’ The attitude, and the language, were typical. Letter, DPM to Alan Pfifer, March 8, 1972, DPM papers, Part I, Box 128.